Links 17 January 2025

The "Tellus" panel from the Ara Pacis in Rome,

depicting a goddess whose exact identity is disputed.

Exhibit at the Morgan Library about their first librarian, Belle da Costa Greene, a fascinating character who was also born black but passed for white. (Morgan Library, The New Yorker, wikipedia) 

Alex Tabarrok reviews "The Remarkable Life of Ibelin," a documentary about a young man with muscular dystrophy who had an amazing life online.

Zvi takes a detailed look at the first week of congestion pricing in Manhattan.

Sometimes people in the Roman empire poured liquid gypsum over burials; one of these was recently excavated in England.

Documenting the hidden 13th-century murals in Angers Cathedral.

Sex education in the early nineteenth century.

Interview with a scholar of Theodore Adorno, much about why thinkers from the early 20th century were pessimistic (gee I wonder) and what sort of hope they nonetheless retained. I was struck by this: "The norms that we must invoke for the purposes of criticism are as damaged as the damaged world."

Sabine Hossenfelder on Jeff Bezos' space plans, 7 minute video.

Fascinating genetic findings Britain, where one Iron Age Celtic community seems to have been dominated by a multi-generation female lineage.

The politics of declaring a species "invasive."

Is it true that men don't read?

A history of the concept of entropy, and doubts about it. Lots of bit-time physicists don't accept the Second Law.

"Net neutrality" was fought over with millions of words, but Tyler Cowen says its disappearance in the US has hardly been noticed. On the other hand what people worried about was what internet providers  would do in secret, so it might be having impacts we can't see; might turn out to be just another reason we are shown some things on the internet but not others.

Literary critic Joseph Epstein always said his life was too boring to ever write a memoir, but in the end he did write a memoir about his boring life.

Writer Kevin Killian wrote a lot of reviews on Amazon, and they have now been published as a 697-page book.

Lev Grossman, "The Bright Sword"

I enjoyed this book, and was at times delighted by it. Lev Grossman is best known for the "Magician" series, which I did not like at all, but this book is something very different and much more fun.

Imagine taking all the versions of the King Arthur story that you know – the high medieval knightly quests, the late medieval tragedy of Arthur's betrayal and fall, the "historical" Arthur defending post-Roman Britain against the Saxons, The Sword in the Stone, the feminist Arthurian books of the 1970s with Morgan le Fay as the protagonist, Monty Python and the Holy Grail – mashing them up together, and trying to set a story in that world. It's mad, but it worked well enough to hold my interest all the way through. 

I especially liked two things about it. First, Grossman has done enough reading to have a real familiarity wth all the Arthurian worlds he invokes, not just the names and narratives but something of the style and attitude, and I very much enjoyed recognizing where all the patches in this quilt came from. Second, I thought Grossman's tone was perfect for a book like this. Mainly it was light, but it was serious enough when it needed to be to convey the wonder and high stakes of the story. Most of the story takes place after Arthur's death, and I felt the characters' struggle to figure out what the new world would be like. Camelot had been, they all recognize, a very special place and time, and they would like to go back to it but know that they cannot.

Quite a few reviewers declared The Bright Sword to be one of the best books of 2024, and I understand why.

DEI is Power

All the leftists out there who thought DEI policies were a weapon for their side only should pay attention to some recent events. Columbia University fired law professor Katherine Franke, a longtime advocate for Palestinian rights among other causes, because of comments she made to a radio show that had nothing to do with the university. Officially, Franke was fired for "discriminatory harassment in violation of our policies." (NY Times, Inside Higher Ed) The most offensive of her comments seems to have been saying that she had doubts about taking Israeli students right out of military service because they often harassed Arab students.

Various people on Twitter/X have said that this wasn't the real reason, which was, depending on which questionable source you prefer, either desire to crack down on somebody, or second-hand reports of statements by Franke that sound a lot worse than the ones she made on the radio. But it was the alleged "discriminatory harassment" that provided the legal cover for the dismissal.

Columbia's policy in these matters is posted online, so we can consider it. The act is defined like this:

Treating individuals less favorably because of their actual or perceived membership in, or association with, a Protected Class, or having a neutral policy or practice that has a disproportionate and unjustified adverse impact on actual and/or perceived members or associates of one Protected Class more than others, constitutes Discrimination. Discrimination includes treating an individual differently on the basis of their actual or perceived membership in, or association with, a Protected Class in the context of an educational program or activity without a legitimate, nondiscriminatory reason so as to deny or limit the ability of the individual to participate in or benefit from Columbia’s services, activities, or privileges.

Discriminatory Harassment may include, but is not limited to, the following acts that denigrate or show hostility or aversion toward one or more actual or perceived members or associates of a Protected Class: verbal abuse; epithets or slurs; negative stereotyping (including, but not limited to, stereotypes about how an individual looks, including skin color, physical features, or style of dress that reflects ethnic traditions; a foreign accent; a foreign name, including names commonly associated with a particular shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics; or speaking a foreign language); threatening, intimidating, or hostile acts; denigrating jokes; insulting or obscene comments or gestures; calls for genocide and/or violence; and the display or circulation of written or graphic material in any form, including but not limited to social media.

Most of this is pretty standard legal verbiage, and some of the vague-sounding terms have been litigated. But Columbia's policy omits one of the standard items in US sexual harassment law, which is that there has to be a pattern of behavior and you have to request that it stop; only if it then does not stop do you have a harassment case. At Columbia, as happened to Franke, you can be dismissed for a single sentence from just about anywhere, including social media or text messages.

Here is an interesting wrinkle:

Speech or conduct expressing views regarding a particular country’s policies or practices does not necessarily constitute Discriminatory Harassment based on national origin. However, if harassing speech or conduct that otherwise appears to be based on views about a country’s policies or practices is directed at or infused with discriminatory comments about persons from, or associated with, that country or another country, then it may constitute Discriminatory Harassment.

Under this rule it would be ok to criticize the Israeli government so long as you make absolutely clear you are not attacking all Israelis. Which is just the kind of rule that gets broken all the time in angry confrontations like we just saw over Gaza. My Ukraine war feed is full of statements about "Russians" that I am sure violate this policy.

There is much language in the policy about creating a Hostile Environment, which  

can be created by unwelcome conduct that, considering the totality of the circumstances, is subjectively and objectively offensive and is so severe or pervasive that it limits or denies a person’s ability to participate in or benefit from any of the University’s educational programs or activities.

We have seen cases in recent years in which students claimed to have been made so upset that they couldn't study by a whole range of things, including, famously, the appearance at Brown of a speaker who denied the existence of "rape culture." If Jewish students say that the pro-Palestinian encampment in the center of campus makes it impossible for them to study, do they have a case? Could a pro-Palestinian student make the same argument about a Jewish student wearing a provocative button or T-shirt? (Like, "Genesis 12:7")

Who decides which speech acts violate this policy? As the firing of Franke shows, the President and Board decide. Without any kind of public hearing or any of that weak stuff. If they decide to get rid of anyone who has ever waded into a political controversy, they can probably find a reason under the "discriminatory harassment" policy.

If you want freedom of speech, you need to stand for everyone's freedom to speak. Whatever limits you accept on your enemies will eventually be used on you.

Links 10 January 2025

New paper in Current Biology says that the famous snail darter, which was the subject of crucial lawsuits under the Endangered Species Act that delayed the Tellico Dam, is not a distinct species at all. Genetic testing shows that it is just an eastern population of the stargazing darter, a fairly common fish. (Paper, NY Times, Reason) The Endangered Species Act is a big temptation to environmentally-minded scientists, because declaring a population a distinct species (e.g., the red wolf) provides so many protective weapons and nobody agrees on what defines a species anyway.

Great Emily Oster piece on the problem of alcohol and health.

Ancient amulet against cancer.

At the international workshop for wildlife fertility control. Interesting but I radically disagree that "indigenous" interventions in nature should be put in a different category than ours.

Libertarian Richard Hanania on American politics: "We’re lucky as a country that one side has xenophobia/racism and the other economic statism. If there was a party that combined both they would win, as things stand they check one another."

Study finds that getting surgeons to warm up for five to ten minutes before they enter the OR improves outcomes. (NY Times, original paper)

Trump's immigration team is trying to find an epidemic disease they can use to close US borders.

CNN reports that the golden lion tamarin, once down to only about 200 in the wild, has recovered nicely thanks to conservation efforts.

New study argues that exposure to lead under the Roman empire was so high as to have significant impacts on health and intelligence. (Original paper, NY Times, ) But the impacts they are talking about are less than modern people endured from 1750 to recent times, so I am not convinced that any of this means much on a civilizational scale.

Former CEO who just sold his company now has no idea what to do with his life. Like Notch after selling Minecraft. It's the hoariest of cliches but life really is about the journey, not the destination. Forget finish lines.

Kevin Drum has a ton of data showing that we still build things in the US. Also, that the regulatory state has made us much safer.

Somewhat interesting study on the brains of people who have or have not recovered from PTSD.

Interesting tomb of a royal physician found in Egypt.

Thoughts on which traits will be more or less valuable in the world of AI.

Crowns and other treasure from Lithuanian royal burials within the Vilnius cathedral.

Russian blogger says their armored assaults never go anywhere and serve only to increase Ukrainian morale; all advance is made by infrantry.

Katherine Rundell

Katherine Rundell is the latest Brit to be both a high-end scholar and a successful author of children's books. If you're curious about her literary scholarship check out this Tyler Cowen interview, or a snippet on my blog here.

I recently read two of Rundell's children's books, Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms (2011) and The Wolf Wilder (2015).

Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms tells the story of a young white girl who grows up on a farm in Zimbabwe – like Katherine Rundell, for a while. She loves her life. She spends it running around the farm her father owns and in the surrounding bush and playing with black boys. Her name is Wilhelmina but her father calls her Wildcat. She can ride a horse, manage baboons and hyenas, and roast bananas in a fire, but her book learning is severely limited and she has no inkling of bourgeois manners. Then her beloved father dies and her guardian marries an evil witch of a woman who insists that young Wildcat be sent to boarding school in England. She is terrified and humiliated by the routine there and her treatment by the other girls. So she rebels and runs away, spending one night in a monkey enclosure at the London Zoo, before eventually going back with a new determination to face down her persecutors and make something of herself.

Wolf wilders, we are told, are people who take the half-tamed wolves that Russian aristocrats used to sometimes keep as pets and return them to the wild. The Wolf Wilder concerns a girl name Feodora who lives with her mother in a house in the Russian woods, helping wolves who grew up in dachas learn how to survive in the forest. "Wolves," the narrator muses, "like children, are not meant to lead calm lives." Feo knows little about the world and does not care to. Until, that is, a sinister army officer named General Rakov shows up and threatens to kill her mother for keeping wolves. This leads to various adventures and dangers, in the course of which Feo meets a would-be peasant revolutionary who is trying to raise his neighbors to fight Rakov. So Feo's childhood rebellion gets mixed up with a bit of real rebellion, although in the end little comes of that.

Rundell's writing is fine, the stories are ok, and if I had any younglings around I would be happy to read these aloud to them.

The thing that struck me most about both of these stories was their reliance on the assumption, or maybe assertion, that children are wild things who naturally have more in common with monkeys or wolves than they do with grownups. The adult world of rules and manners and propriety is, we are to assume, horrific to any child with spirit. We come into the world wild, and if we must learn to fit in, we should never forget that we were once wild things who wanted only to live free.

This is utterly foreign to my own childhood, which was abolutely unwild. Nor is it the only way to construct an adventure for children; in many stories it is assumed that regular childhood is boring, and we must leave the safey and comfort of home to find adventure elsewhere. Bilbo left the Shire on the road to the Lonely Mountain; Wendy, John, and Michael flew out of the nursery with Peter Pan and Tinkerbell to have their adventures in Neverland.

So I wonder how actual children see this, and if they are more likely to relate to Wildcat and Feo or to see them as outlandish and alien.

I also wonder about Katherine Rundell; does part of her seethe at the confines of Cambridge and its rules? Or is she a mild-mannered person who likes her adventures safely within the pages of a book?

Letting the Data Speak for Itself

From Khoa Vu on Twitter/X.

Court Ladies and their Embroidery

Interesting NY Times review of The Waiting Game: The Untold Story of the Women Who Served the Tudor Queens, by Nicola Clark. The position of these women is so strange to us that we have a hard time wrapping our minds around it. On the one hand, their positions and even their survival depended largely on the support of their male relatives, and they had to spend an immense amount of time and effort looking beautiful in the background of courts events. Were they oppressed? Frustrated? Thrilled to be so close to the center of it all? Bored out of their minds?

I personally have a hard time imagining any career I would hate more than to be a court lady, so confined by social rules, familial expectations, and cumbersome clothes, with so little freedom to make meaningful choices or get your hands dirty with real work. Ugh. But the evidence is that hundreds of women fought for these places; is that maybe evidence of how miserable every other kind of life was at the time?

Not that the women had no choices to make, or no power. They endlessly networked and used those connections to benefit their families and their friends. They also had their own kinds of art. I was struck by this: 

The Duchess of Norfolk was forced to abandon a “complex embroidery work” when her husband banished her so he could carry on an affair. The work, described in inventories as “a great pomegranate of gold,” had perhaps been her silent form of protest at the treatment of her queen, as the fruit was Catherine of Aragon’s symbol. 

This connects to what Laurel Thatcher wrote about women's cloth work in colonial North America, which was simultaneously practical, political, and self-expressive. Women said a lot without writing it down.

Afghan "Reconstruction" and the Perils of Politics

John F. Sopko has been the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction since 2012. He spent years trying to convince people in Washington that the war was failing and the Afghan government we supported was a sham, and in this NY Times op-ed he is still bitter about it: 

The collapse of the U.S.-backed government in Afghanistan on Aug. 15, 2021, revealed what little American lives and money had purchased over 20 years there. It also laid bare a gaping disconnect between reality and what senior U.S. officials had been telling Americans for decades: that success was just around the corner.

As the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, my staff and I have audited and investigated U.S. programs and spending to rebuild Afghanistan — a mission that, it was hoped, would turn the theocratic, tribal-based “Graveyard of Empires” into a modern liberal democracy.

In hundreds of reports over the last 12 years, we have detailed a long list of systemic problems: The U.S. government struggled to carry out a coherent strategy, fostered overly ambitious expectations, started unsustainable projects and did not understand the country or its people. American agencies measured success not by what they accomplished, but by dollars spent or checklists of completed tasks. . . .

To win promotions and bigger salaries, military and civilian leaders felt they had to sell their tours of duty, deployments, programs and projects as successes — even when they were not. Leaders tended to report and highlight favorable information while obscuring that which pointed to failure. After all, failures do not lead to an ambassadorship or an elevation to general.

Sopko goes on to detail all the usual failures of American government in action: money spent simply to justify having a bigger budget next year, projects pushed through to completion even though the rationale for them had evaporated. We were supposed to be supporting the development of Afghan security forces, so rosy statistics on the number of soldiers etc. were reported, even though Sopko's office kept reporting that many Afghan soldiers were "ghosts" kept on the books so the officers could pocket their salaries, and so on.

It's worth thinking over how we managed to spend hundreds of billion on this disaster.

It began with the righteous fury that overtook the US after 9-11 and Bush II's war against "evil." I didn't bother to oppose our invasion of Afghanistan because I saw it as inevitable; they were harboring our enemies and we were  not going to stand for that. But I never thought it would end well. I recall posting somewhere the words of a 19th-century British Parliamentarian who said, "the first rule of politics is, don't invade Afghanistan."

Then our wars of retribution got mixed up with a grander set of ideas. The root cause of terrorism, many westerners believed, was the failure of governments across the Middle East to provide decent lives for their citizens. The region was dominated by two forces: vicious authoritarian thugs, and religious reactionaries. In that context, terrorism seemed inevitable and maybe even admirable. What was needed was to reshape these countries toward democracy, capitalism, and hope. So we embarked on our trillion-dollar crusade to reshape the Middle East. We invaded two countries and set up new governments, and various Washington types called for invading more.

There is a very limited sense in which this was successful; after a 15-year nightmare, Iraq has emerged as a better place than it was under Saddam. There is a real Arab movement for democracy and human rights, and some of its proponents have welcomed or defended US intervention. We can hope that maybe the final completion of the Syrian revolt will lead to something better than Assad, although for now it remains only a hope.

But the price has been very, very high: US politics has been corrupted, and the elites that supported the interventions discredited, leading to the rise of Trump and other angry outsiders. Across the region, hundreds of thousands of deaths. The Arab Spring began with high hopes but spawned mostly reaction and repression, with the Egyptian middle classes hurriedly abandoning their own call for democracy. 

After Bush we got Obama, who continued the Afghan war for other reasons. He campaigned as a moderate who opposed, not all wars, but only "dumb wars," so it was crucial to his positioning that while he withdrew from Iraq he supported trying to tame Afghanistan. It was his administration that saw most of the lies and rose-tinged forecasts that so annoy Sopko.

So it was not until Trump that we had a president willing to abandon Afghanistan, and it may be (opinions differ on this) that he accepted an absurdly long withdrawal timeline from the Pentagon because he wanted to put anything that smacked of defeat off until after the 2020 election. So it was left to Biden to bite the bullet.

Linsk 3 January 2024

Eye Idols from Bronze Age Syria

The Japanese myth of Amaterasu and the founding of the imperial dynasty is bonkers.

Kevin Drum has some data on AI progress in recent years: performance here, the cost of training here, and business use here. 

Retired GOP congressman expects a "shit show" in the next session.

Is the expansion of the universe really accelerating? Major new paper says no. (News article, 7-minute video, original paper)

Weird article about "the neural conundrum behind the slowness of human behavior. The information throughput of a human being is about 10 bits/s. In comparison, our sensory systems gather data at ~10^9 bits/s." Via Marginal Revolution.

A lot was made at the time over how much the "investors" in Bernie Madoff's ponzi scheme lost, but in the end about 90% of the money was recovered. All the huge numbers about tens of billions is losses come from using as the baseline, not the amount paid in, but the amount that Madoff promised. About $1.7 billion of the recovered money came in a settlement paid by JPMorgan Chase, after a court found they knew about the scheme and did not alert authorities. I looked into this after reading a novel (The Glass Hotel by Emily Saint John Mandel) in which a clone of Madoff features prominently; until then Madoff had vanished from my consciousness.

Excellent Scott Siskind piece on H1N5 flu. His conclusion is that the chance of a dangerous pandemic in the next year is not much more than usual.

With the use of coins in decline, Britain's Royal Mint is shifting its focus to recycling circuit boards and other electronic parts, making the recovered gold into jewelry. (NY Times, Royal Mint, BBC) Awesome idea, but I wonder about the economics.

New paper estimates productivity growth in England was zero until 1600 but then averaged 2% across the 1600s and 1700s. A variety of studies are pointing to the 1600s – a great era of globalization and trade – as the period when modern economic growth began. Change was not as rapid as in the 1800s, when productivity growth averaged 4%, but it was real and significant. People noticed, and by the 1690s we had early "economists" writing about growth and rising wealth.

The real-life pet detective.

Americans can't stop fighting about the health effects of alcohol. Heavy drinking is bad for you. But light to moderate drinking has complex effects, apparently causing some cancers (although this all but impossible to prove) but reducing deaths from heart disease (although nobody knows if that is a chemical effect of alcohol or just because people who drink moderately have happier lives and more friends). Scolds who hate fun are determined to prove that drinking, like all vices, is inherently bad, and want the government to weigh in heavily against it, but the science does not support that. (NY Times)

Virginia man arrested with a cache of pipe bombs was into an online thing called "No Lives Matter," which seems to the the nihilist endpoint of ring-wing apocalypticism. (NY Times, Homeland Security bulletin) One of their most widely circulated posts says, "Societal standards should not exist. They are to be crushed by any means possible." But the song by Tom MacDonald gets a lot more Google hits.

The hard problem of long-term digital storage. I recently tried to recover something 15-years-old from an "archival" cd and it was hopelessly corrupted.

Daniel Defoe's Tour of Britain.

US military is worried that the intensity of battlefield drones will prevent helicopter evacuation of wounded soldiers and lead to more deaths in future wars.

Speaking of which, Ukraine claims its naval drones shot down two Russian helicopters.

Past post from 2013 that seems relevant, Nelson Mandela, George Washington, and Timothy McVeigh.

RIP Jimmy Carter

The best ex-President since Taft.

Tanit

Tanit was the chief goddess of Carthage, but that is where agreement about her ceases. She was usually  represented in this striking geometric way. So it is easy to find thousands of images of her from all across Carthage's empire.

As to where she came from, well, just her wikipedia article says in one paragraph that the name obviously comes from Berber and is thus North African, in another that the name comes from Ugarit, and in another that it may be derived from Astarte, the Phoenician mother goddess, equivalent to Ishtar. So, yeah. 

Probably best to think of her as the local variant of the Great Goddess worshipped across the Middle East. Some online sources say that before Carthage became independent of Phoenicia in the 6th century Astarte was the main goddess, and Tanit only emerged after 500 BC. So perhaps her rise was attached to local Carthaginian pride.

In Roman times she was assimilated to various Greco-Roman deities, and started to look like this.

One of my favorite things about these great goddesses is the number of things they were associated with: fertility, virginity, civilization, farming, the moon, war, plague. And, sometimes, human sacrifice. But then I suppose there is no special reason a powerful, immortal being has to have limited interests.

How Joseph Schumpeter Imagined the End of Capitalism

My quest to understand why Americans are so grouchy despite living through what looks to me like the best fifty years in human history has led me to Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950). Schumpeter prophesied that capitalism would end, not because of its failures, but because of its success.

Schumpeter's theory had two related parts. First, he imagined that ever-rising material wealth would lead people to become more sensitive to the insecurity and constant change that capitalism inevitably causes:

Secular improvement that is taken for granted and coupled with individual insecurity that is acutely resented is of course the best recipe for breeding social unrest.

The second part of the theory has to do with the rise of a large intellectual class. Growing wealth leads to ever more education, and some fraction of people become intellectuals. By "intellectuals" Schumpeter meant what others have called the "chattering classes," the people who have lots of opinions that they constantly share with the public:

Intellectuals are people who wield the power of the spoken and the written word, and one of the touches that distinguish them from other people who do the same is the absence of direct responsibility for practical affairs….

By their nature, intellectuals are a critical bunch, and Schumpeter predicted that as capitalism created more and more wealth, intellectuals would become ever more critical of it. One usually sees this argument cited against the post-World War II Left, the "cultural Marxists," all that stuff about the inauthenticity of consumer capitalism and so on. (All the discussion of Schumpeter I have found  this morning comes from conservatives.) But it seems to me that it applies equally to the nationalist right, the people who constantly complain about the decline in manufacturing jobs and the hollowing out of small towns left behind by the economy. Capitalism creates constant change; that is its essence. If you are a conservative because you want to preserve what John Boehner called "the world I grew up in," then you fit into Schumpeter's model just as well as Herbert Marcuse.

I find much about this persuasive; if our unhappiness requires a rationale, maybe this is it. I am not sure, though, that there is really anything to explain. Part of me thinks that evolution shaped human nature to be perpetually unsatisfied, and nothing else is really needed to explain why the wealthiest and most free people in history think their society sucks.

Links 27 December 2024

Ceramic Dancers from Han Dynasty China 

Rebuilding the wooden roof of Notre Dame de Paris.

More about the MAGA vs. Big Tech split over Indian immigrants, from Kevin Drum and Noah Smith.

How an obscure 1915 change in immigration law led to a huge boom in Chinese restaurants in America.

Great side gig for Utahans who look like Jesus. Or how Mormons imagine Jesus.

Medieval people healing themselves by eating images of the saints.

Amazing Hellenistic tomb excavated in western Greece, lots of gold.

Jennifer Pahlka wants to "bring Elon to a knife fight;" can he reform the government where so many others have failed? Would you root for or against that? Interesting essay that won one of David Brooks Sydney Awards.

At Slate, Molly Oldstead argues that the drone/alien craze happened because people have traded old-fashioned religion for a grab-bag of random paranormal beliefs. The number of people who regularly attend religious services has plummeted, but the number of atheists is still small.

The story of the endangered Bechtel's Bat and Britain's HS-2 train; it seems that there may not have been any bats along the train's route until scientists went looking for them using hi-tech lures. I have similar issues with bat preservation in the US, where "endangered" bat species have a habit of showing up everywhere anybody looks hard for them. On Twitter/X.

Interesting 11-minute video on South Korea, which connects the low birth rate to widespread resentful misery: "People are finding it easier to opt out of the system and just get angry instead."

Since 2000, immigrants, who make up 14% of US residents, have won 40% of the Nobel Prizes granted to Americans. Some MAGA guy on Twitter yesterday said that we don't need imported scientists because "we built the bomb and got to the moon on our own," which inspired a lot of chuckling.

Kitchen efficiency in 1899: the Hoosier Cabinet.

In the cities where they have trained, Waymo driverless cars have about one tenth as many accidents as cars driven by people.

Interesting French post on an old tidal mill on the southwest coast, an area where saltworks, developed in the Middle Ages, were later turned in to fishponds, oyster nurseries, and water channels for the tide mill.

Revisiting San Francisco's recently ended experiment in "de-tracking" high school math. Like almost all discussions of the subject it fails by not asking, "What is school for"? Or, more specifically, "Why do we care if anyone learns algebra?"

The decline of stay-at home-mothers has more to do with high wages than ecomonic distress.

Interesting NY Times article on crime and homelessness in New Mexico, free for now. Includes the famous line, the killer "had been prescribed medication for schizophrenia but often refused to take it."

Video emerges of a new, large Chinese fighter jet with no tail and three engines; some people are call ing it "sixth generation." Certainly drove aviation Twitter/X into a frenzy.

Asked what transportation success story he wants to talk up in his final days on the job, Pete Buttigieg says, "fish culverts."

Wooden shoe and other well-preserved objects from a 15th-century privy.

Bronze statues and coins found at the San Casciano dei Bagni hot springs in Tuscany.

Wars get uglier the longer they last. Here is a tweet saying that of the 147 confirmed Russian executions of Ukrainian POWs, 127 have been in 2024. And here is Haaretz, Israel is Losing its Humanity in Gaza.

Soviet Cybernetics

From Tyler Cowen's interview with Stephen Kotkin:

COWEN: Why were the Soviets so obsessed with cybernetics and AI, say, in the 1960s? Is it that they understood where things were going? Or it just was a big stupid mistake?

KOTKIN: You can never rule out big stupid mistakes if we’re honest, certainly about our own lives and analogizing from them. The Soviets were interested in cybernetics because it was about more efficient ways of gathering and using information — the planned economy at core, which was a fantasy, never a reality.

In practice, the planned economy was central control over some scarce commodities, resources, products so that you could prioritize. And you could therefore supply those privileged factories in your supply chains with the scarce resources to produce predominantly military-industrial products, but not exclusively, and the rest of the stuff come what may. That was black market, including black market factory of factory.

Cybernetics was a solution whereby you could make planning work better. You could optimize the information you were getting from the localities, and then you could optimize the way that you organize things. It was a fantasy in a different light, and it’s the same one that the Chinese Communist Party has today, which is to say if your authoritarian politics and your productive economy don’t mesh very well, turn to technology, turn to technological solutions to get beyond the fact that you refuse to do the structural reforms on the institutional side to ensure that the productivity, the dynamism continues.

It’s this eternal fantasy that science and tech will enable you not to have to give up central control, power, Communist Party monopoly. From the scientific point of view, it was fascinating because that’s who they were. They were exceptional world-class mathematicians, world-class physicists, world-class computer scientists, and so for them, it was the same thing it would be for scientists anywhere.

The whole interview is very interesting, especially on life in Magnitogorsk. 

MAGA vs. Big Tech

Richard Hanania, a grouchy libertarian I read on Twitter/X sometimes, has landed in the middle of an angry internet fight that he thinks has important implications. He wrote:

The right wing civil war is going to be over Indians.

The populists hate all immigration. The Tech Right will go along with them on Latin America and Africa because of the skills issue. They'll go along with Muslims because of cultural concerns.

High-skilled Indians is the one group where racism is the only explanation for wanting to restrict numbers.

He got thousands of responses to this and other, similar tweets that generally go like this:

Why should Americans not prioritize other Americans over Indians?

I want my kin to get into American schools and companies before foreigners do. Is that irrational? Is that a problem?

I would rather the USA slide down into an economic/technological backwater than deal with this preponderance of third world genius/saints. Our native stock is only overlooked because we are too expensive for the corporate/academic world and much harder to coerce.

Hanania responded by reaching deep into his bag to throw the worst insult in his lexicon at MAGA:

Again, this is the exact same logic and worldview of the wokes. Merit, talent, and economics don't exist. Every group could succeed as well as every other. If one gets ahead, it's because it practiced racism. You can get the demographic balance you want through will power. . . . I told you nationalists had the same resentment-fueled collectivist ideology as the wokes.

White nationalists are just like the woke! Come to think of it, he has a point; Imbram X. Kendi and Steve Bannon do agree on one thing, that if their people are not getting ahead it is because they are being blocked by nefarious forces.

Hanania thinks the alliance between MAGA and right-wing types will be short-lived because the tech world needs high-skilled immigrants:

This is one of the biggest splits between MAGA and the Tech Right. MAGA doesn’t want foreigners around no matter how talented they are. Tech people know that’s crazy. They’ll try to argue to MAGA that it is about letting in people with high skills but that won’t convince them.

I loved this exchange:

Commenter - I could invite smart strangers to live in my house too, but I don't for mostly the same reasons I don't want mass meritocratic brown foreigner importation. Why would I want infinite Indians in my home country just because they can do mid-tier IT work? I care about more than GDP.

Hanania: Right, you're also driven by hate and a sense of inferiority.

As a side effect of all this, Hanania started to hear from dozens of Indian tech workers thrilled that a white conservative is standing up for them in such strong terms. Several even donated to his Patreon. He wrote to them directly:

To all Indians out there. I know it’s been a tough day. You have seen the face of racism. But know that you belong, and together we will defeat the bigots. They do not represent who we are.

I wonder if this is right. Is the "tech right" going to split from Trump and MAGA over H1-B visas and Indian immigration? If so, who will win?

Researching Some Random Images from Pinterest

I don't know what other people do on a lazy Christmas afternoon, but I like to visit my Pinterest and track down the many unidentified or misidentified objects I find there. Above is one that had no ID, which I correctly guessed was a modern Inuit work; turned out to be "Shaman with Wings" by Lucy Tikiq Tunguak, Canadian artist born 1939.

This delightful deer is a terra cotta work from Kashir in India, 4th century AD, now in the Cleveland Museum of Art. I would have guessed medieval Turkey or central Asia.

This mysterious pewter object has been identified by self-proclaimed online experts as a Renaissance amulet, a classical Roman amulet, a recent metal detector find by a guy named Dave Caplan, and a work by a contemporary artist named Dave Caplan. I checked all the artists I could find named Dave/David Caplan and could not find any work that looked remotely like this. So, still a mystery. Pewter decays faster than any other metal I know of, so if this really is classical piece it must have been deposited in weird circumstance.

Carolingian stone cross from western France, appeared in a travelling exhibit of Carolingian art in 2014.

This one intrigued me because it looks medieval, but on the other hand it is just the kind of medieval design contemporary artisans would enjoy re-using or modifying. Somebody on Facebook identified this as "Plate of the western golden gates of the Nativity Cathedral in Suzdal, 13th century." Suzdal Cathedral is a famous Russian monument constructed in the 12th century, and it seems to have a lot of gilded metal inside, so that fits.

Obviously steppes; turned out to be a Scythian work now in the Hermitage Museum.

Knotwork from Iona Abbey, photo by Martin Burns, 2005. Memo to the person who posted this on Pinterest: this is not a "spiral." Not all Celtic art is "spirals."

This one is "St. Francis" by a Polish artist named Antoni Rzasa (1919-1980), dated 1960-61.

Made no headway on this one. Medieval slavic?

AI Book Recommendations

People have been asking LLMs what five books people should read to help them lead better lives. Chat GPT:

1. Man's Search for Meaning - Viktor Frankl
2. Atomic Habits - James Clear
3. The Power of Now - Eckhart Tolle
4. Meditations - Marcus Aurelius
5. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People - Stephen Covey

Here is Grok:

1. Meditations - Marcus Aurelius
2. Man's Search for Meaning - Viktor Frankl
3. The Art of Loving - Ethan Fromm
4. The Power of Now - Eckhart Tolle
5. How to Win Friends and Influence People - Dale Carnegie

The Fairy Melusine, the House of Lusignan, and the Château de Saint-Jean-d’Angle

The Château de Saint-Jean-d’Angle is a modest castle in the west of France, surrounded by salt marshes along the Seudre River, near the mouth of the Garonne. The original castle was a plain shell keep, a type more common in England than France. The exact date of its contruction is much disputed, with various sources offering dates from the 980s to the 1280s; I lean toward the reign of Henry II of England, 1154-1189. Much of what you see today dates to a major restoration completed in 1624, as shown by a dated stone in the foundation of the hall. But anyway the castle might be quite old, which is crucial to its contemporary reputation. 

Because whenever it was built, it belonged to the Lords of Lusignan. The Lusignan family was famous for two things. First, their part in the Crusades and the Latin East in general; one branch became the Kings of Jerusalem when that title meant ruling mainly over Cyprus. Second, they are supposed to have been made great by the Fairy Melusine. One of the things Melusine is supposed to have done is built a bunch of castles for her Lusignan husband, and the propaganda of the privately owned castle proudly proclaims it the only Lusignan castle remaining from the time of Melusine.

The earliest full version of the Melusine story was The Romance of Poitou or Lusignan, alias the Tale of Melusine, composed around 1390 by Jean d'Arras. Arras said he was following "old chapbooks and spinning tales," and there is no reason to doubt him, since various elements of the story are ancient and widespread. The first historical figure in the House of Lusignan was Hugh I, who would have lived around 900 AD. In fact the first six Lords of Lusignan were all named Hugh, which creates certain difficulties for tying the legend to history, since in the Romance the Lord of Lusignan is named Raymondin. But who cares! Let's just say our castle dates to "the time of Melusine" anyway.

The story of Melusine starts like this:

One day while King Elainas was out hunting he stopped to quench his thirst at a spring, whereby he heard the voice of a woman singing. Here he met the fairy Pressine, though he questioned her he could not learn from where she came. They were married with the one condition that Elainas promise to never interrupt her while she was lying-in. Pressine gave birth to triplets, three daughters; Melusine, Meliot, and Palatine. Upon hearing the news that Pressine had given birth, Elainas could not contain his joy and burst in upon her while she was bathing her daughters. Pressine flew into a wrath of anger and promised that from then on her descendants would avenge her. She left with her daughters for the home of her sister the Queen of the Lost Island.

Medieval illustrators loved this discovery scene

The theme of broken taboos repeats twice more in the story, always leading to disasters. Melusine's personal curse, acquired by violating one of her mother's prohibitions, is that every Saturday her lower body turns into a snake. She eventually marries Raymondin of Lusignan, strictly prohibiting him from ever seeing her on Saturday, which of course he eventually does, but not until after they have had ten sons, each with a different strange deformity, and she has made the family rich and powerful. The Lusignans have lots of descendants, including both the Hapsburgs and the English royal line, so the story became quite famous across Europe.

My personal favorite story from the Romance concerns Geoffrey of the Giant Tooth, one of Melusine's sons, who went crazy and massacred a hundred monks over an incident invovling one of the monastery pigs. Incidentally Melusine didn't die at the end but only sank into a rock, and if you find her golden key you can set her free and marry her. But I'm not sure I recommend her as a spouse.

As a prominent house the Lusignans had many homes much grander than our little castle. Their main seat, Lusignan, is illustrated in the Tres Riches Heures of Jean, Duc de Berry, but nothing of it remains standing.

But back to Le Château de Saint-Jean-d’Angle. Poitou was fought over for centuries by the kings of England and France, and one assumes that the castle had some role in these wars, but neither the usual online sources nor the PowerPoint-mad local historian of Belle Saintonge has any details.

The first known fight at the castle took place in 1568, when it was besieged by Protestant forces during the Wars of Religion. This did "significant damage" to the castle, which is presumably why it needed the major restoration of 1624. The restoration was carried out by Charlotte Saint-Gelais de Lusignan, about whom I have been able to find out nothing else. At that time the castle acquired a carving showing Melusine in her bath, or so written sources say, but it must not look like much because I can't find a picture of it.

By 1990 the castle is pretty bad shape, as this image shows. Removal of the vegetation, I read, revealed "catastrophic" conditions.

In 1994 it was acquired by a businessman named Alain Rousselot. Rousselot got some grants from the French government and restored it, turning it into a "medieval theme park" with trebuchet demonstrations and the like.

Whatever it takes, I guess. And if "from the time of Melusine" helps draw people in, I'm not really going to complain about that, either.

Three-Faced Gods

Above, some Celtic three-faced gods from Roman Gaul. The obsession of our Indo-European ancestors with the number three has of course spawned a lot of speculation, much of it focusing on the quirks of our language. But I am not really convinced by any of it. There is a wonder to these triplings, a mystery, something we can almost grasp but that remains just outside our grip, a notion that things can be the same in some ways but nonetheless distinct, a basic idea that the divine world does not follow mundane laws. I would look to that sense of mystery rather than to any "explanation."

Anyway, these carvings did not disappear with Christianity, as you can see from the medieval versions below, all in French churches of the 12th to 15th centuries. Love the three-faced Pope, which hints that there used to be more of these images in now-vanished church paintings.

Again, I am reluctant to assign much meaning to these. Maybe they have something to do with the Trinity; maybe they are memories of ancient three-faced gods; maybe they are just arresting, provoking images that are really fun to carve.

Everyday Life in Greek Vase Paintings

Harvesting olives.

Fishing

Wedding Procession, Amasis Painter, 550-530 BC

Women at the water house, c. 500 BC

Weaving

Woman at a laver, c 500 BC

Weaving, Amasis painter

Washing clothes

Shoemaker

Pet bird

School

Carrying water